You've been through all of the board games and the kids are fighting and you can't even think straight anymore. What do you do? Honestly, I don't really know but I do have a handful of ideas. Last year I brought you
Ten Ways to Beat Cabin Fever and today I'm talking about 10 More Ways to Beat cabin Fever.
We just got our first snow this year in WSNC but I know all of you northerners have been hit pretty hard for a while now so I thought it would be a good time to talk about what you could do inside to fight boredom. Grab your kids and sit them down for some of these fun indoor activities when the winter blues hit!
1. Make a T-shirt. There are a gazillion ideas on Pinterest for T-shirt crafts. I've got a post on creating your favorite team shirt coming up soon.
2.
Make tic-tac-toe pizza.
3. Write a letter to the future you. Encourage your kids to sit down with you and tell their future selves some things. You can ask them some questions to get them thinking. For example, what do you wish for yourself in the future? What do you hope your life will be like? What do regret or wish you'd done differently? Do you imagine yourself as being happy? What's the most important thing in your life right now? You can write about those things.
You can also use
this website to type the letter and it will actually be sent to you on that future date.
4. Plan your summer vacation. Okay, I simply have to give a shameless plug here for
our condo at the beach but of course you don't have to plan your summer vacation to Myrtle Beach. There are lots of fun things that you and your kids can do to start thinking ahead to your big family trip. You can gather things from around the house and put together activity bags for the car rides. You can research activities to do while your there. You could give the kids a budget to stick to and see what they come up with. You can also write out a meal plan or itinerary and when the kids get to offer input they'll be more apt to not complain when you get there.
7. Watch some basketball! I don't know about where you are but I live in ACC territory and college basketball games can be relatively inexpensive and a lot of fun. On any given night of the week we can usually find a basketball game going on somewhere near us.
If you can't get to a game, then dig out your sand pails from the beach last summer and set them up Bozo the Clown style and see how many baskets the kids can make in succession before they miss one.
8. Create a new
Zentangle. Here's the most recent one I started while waiting for Julianna to finish piano yesterday.
9. Give your kids your digital camera to play with. Send them to another room and see what they come back with. When they're finished you can even have a funny selfie contest.
10. Take out a deck of cards and a couple of dice. Have each kid choose a card and roll the dice. The numbers on the dice correspond to these twelve exercises and the card they choose tells them how many of that exercise they have to do. The game is over when everyone has finished 5 sets of exercises.
- 1 = run up the stairs
- 2 = tag the front door, the back door, and any side doors in your house
- 3 = jumping jacks
- 4 = arm circles forward and then back
- 5 = sit-ups
- 6 = leg raises
- 7 = squat jumps
- 8 = high knees
- 9 = heel kicks
- 10 = bicep curls
- 11 = kids choice
- 12 = 10 second wall sits
Bonus points if you can get your kids to alphabetize your bookshelves or DVD collection.
Now I want to know: How do you beat cabin fever?
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Edited to add: Hahaha I just saw a spot on the TODAY Show about beating cabin fever and they included a few of my same ideas.
Remember this? We took a piece of poster board and cut big holes in it and hung it in a door frame in order to fly our paper airplanes through.
